emissions | Serendipity

Canada leads the world (but not in a good way)

22. April 2009 · 1 comment · Categories: climate science, reducing emissions · Tags: carbon footprint, climate change, decarbonization, emissions, greenhouse gases, sustainability, understanding

Chris Jones, from the UK Met Office Hadley Centre, presented a paper at EGU 2009 yesterday on The Trillionth Tonne. The analysis shows that the key driver of temperature change is the total cumulative amount of carbon emissions. To keep below the 2°C global average temperature rise generally regarded as the threshold for preventing dangerous warming, we need to keep total cumulative emissions below a trillion tonnes. And the world is already halfway there.

Which is why the latest news about Canada’s carbon emissions are so embarrassing. Canada is now top among the G8 nations for emissions growth. Let’s look at the numbers: 747 megatonnes in 2007, up from 592 megatonnes in 1990. Using the figures in the Environment Canada report, I calculated the Canada has emitted over 12 gigatonnes since 1990. That’s 12 billion tonnes. So, in 17 years we burnt though more than 1.2% of the entire world’s total budget of carbon emissions. A total budget that has to last from the dawn of industrialization to the point at which the whole world become carbon-neutral. Oh, and Canada has 0.5% of the world’s population.

Disclaimer: I have to check whether the Hadley Centre’s target is 1 trillion tonnes of CO2-equivalent, or 1 trillion tonnes of Carbon (they are different!). The EnvCanada report numbers refer to the former.

Update: I checked with Chris, and as I feared, I got the wrong units – it’s a trillion tonnes of carbon. The conversion factor is about 3.66, so that gives us about 3.66 trillion tonnes of carbon dioxide to play with. [Note: Emissions targets are usually phrased in terms of “Carbon dioxide equivalent”, which is a bit hard to calculate as different greenhouse gases have both different molecular weights and different warming factors].

So my revised figures are that Canada burnt through only about 0.33% of the world’s total budget in the last 17 years. Which looks a little better, until you consider:

by population, that’s 2/3 of Canada’s entire share.
Using the cumulative totals from 1900-2002. plus the figures for the more recent years from the Environment Canada report (and assuming 2008 was similar to 2007) we’ve emitted 27 gigatonnes of CO2 since 1900. Which is about 0.73% of the world’s budget, or about 147% of our fair share per head.
By population, our fair share of the world’s budget is about 18 gigatonnes CO2 (=5 gigatonnes Carbon). We’d burnt through that by 1997. Everything since then is someone else’s share.

Modeling challenge (part 2)

09. April 2009 · Write a comment · Categories: books, reducing emissions, research ideas · Tags: climate change, emissions, energy, ideas, models, requirements, stabilization, targets, visualization

Okay, here’s a slightly different modeling challenge. It might be more of a visualization challenge. Whatever. In part 1, I suggested we use requirements analysis techniques to identify stakeholders, and stakeholder goals, and link them to the various suggested “wedges“.

Here, I want to suggest something different. There are several excellent books that attempt to address the “how will we do it?” challenge. They each set out a set of suggested solutions, add up the contribution of each solution to reducing emissions, assess the feasibility of each solution, add up all the numbers, and attempt to make some strategic recommendations. But each book makes different input assumptions, focusses on slightly different kinds of solutions, and ends up with different recommendations (but they also agree on many things).

Here are the four books:

George Monbiot, Heat: How to Stop the Planet from Burning. This is probably the best book I have ever read on global warming. It’s brilliantly researched, passionate, and doesn’t pull it’s punches. Plus it’s furiously upbeat – Monbiot takes on the challenge of how we get to 90% emissions reduction, and shows that it is possible (although you kind of have to imagine a world in which politicians are willing to do the right thing).

Joseph Romm, Hell and High Water: Global Warming–the Solution and the Politics–and What We Should Do. While lacking Monbiot’s compelling writing style, Romm makes up by being an insider – he was an energy policy wonk in the Clinton administration. The other contrast is Monbiot is British, and focusses mainly on British examples, Romm is American and focusses on US example. The cultural contrasts are interesting.

David MacKay, Sustainable Energy – Without the Hot Air. Okay, so I haven’t read this one yet, but it got a glowing write-up on Boing Boing . Oh, and it’s available as a free download.

Lester Brown, Plan B 3.0L Mobilizing to Save Civilization. This one’s been on my reading list for a while, will read it soon. It has a much broader remit than the others: Brown wants to solve world poverty, cure disease, feed the world, and solve the climate crisis. I’m looking forward to this one. And it’s also available as a free download.

Okay, so what’s the challenge? Model the set of solutions in each of these books so that it’s possible to compare and contrast their solutions, compare their assumptions, and easily identify areas of agreement and disagreement. I’ve no idea yet how to do this, but a related challenge would be to come up with compelling visualizations that explain to a much broader audience what these solutions look like, and why it’s perfectly feasible. Something like this (my current favourite graphic):

Graph of cost/benefit of climate mitigation strategies

Stakeholders in our own destruction

08. April 2009 · Write a comment · Categories: advocacy, politics · Tags: climate change, crisis, emissions, systems, understanding

This is depressing.

We were at the bank this morning, setting up some investment plans for retirement and for the kids to go through University (In Canada-speak: RRSPs and RESPs). We started to pick out a portfolio of mutual funds into which we would be putting the investments, and our financial advisor was showing us one of the mutual funds he would recommend when I noticed the fund included a substantial investment in the Canadian Oil Sands. “No way” says I. So we went to his next pick. Same thing. And the next. And the next….

The oil sands have been described as the most destructive project on earth. They are the major reason that Canada will renege on its Kyoto treaty obligations. They will devastate a huge area of Alberta, and threaten clean water supplies and the wildlife of large parts of North America.

So, I was struck by the irony of funding the kids through University by investing in a project that will so thoroughly screw up the world in which they will have to live when they grow up.

But then I thought about it some more. Pretty much the entire middle class in Canada must have money invested in this project, if it shows up in most of the mutual funds commonly recommended for retirement and education savings plans. Most of them probably have no idea (after all, who actually looks closely at the contents of their mutual funds?) and of those that do know, most of them will prefer the high rate of return on this project because they have no real understanding of the extent of the climate crisis.

Those funds are being used to maximize the profit from the oils sands, by paying for lobbyists to fight environmental regulations, to fight caps on greenhouse gas emissions, and to fight against alternative energy initiatives (which would eat into the market for oil from the oil sands).

How on earth can we make any progress on fighting climate change when we all have a financial stake in not doing so?

We’re fucked.

Why there’s no silver bullet

27. March 2009 · Write a comment · Categories: climate science, reducing emissions · Tags: emissions, evidence, feedbacks, greenhouse gases, IPCC, stabilization, targets

There is no silver bullet for climate change, just as there’s no silver bullet for software engineering. To understand why this is, you need to understand the magnitude of the problem.

Firstly, there’s the question of what a “safe” temperature rise would be. There’s a broad consensus among climate scientists that about a rise of around 2°C (above pre-industrial levels) is a sensible upper limit. I’ve asked a number of climate scientists why this threshold, and the answer is that above this level, scary feedback effects start to kick in, and then we’re in serious trouble. If you look at the assessments from the IPCC, the lowest stabilization level they consider is 450 ppm (parts per million), but its clear from their figures that even at this level, we would overshoot the 2°C threshold. Since that report, some scientists have argued this is way too high, and 350ppm would be a better target. Worryingly, the last IPCC assessment was based on climate models that did not include feedback effects.

Then, there’s the question of how to get there. Stabilizing at 350-450ppm requires a reduction of greenhouse emissions of around 80% in industrialized nations by the year 2050. Monbiot argues that if you think in terms of a reduction per capita, you have to allow for population growth. So that really means a reduction more like 90% per person. And again, due to our uncertainty about feedback effects, the emissions targets may need to be even lower.

How do reduce emissions by 90% per person? The problem is that our emissions of greenhouse gases come from everything we do, and no one activity or industry dominates. I was looking for a good graphic for my ICSE talk, to illustrate this point, when I came across this chart of sources of emissions:

World Greenhouse Gas Emissions by Sector

I think that’s enough on it’s own to show there is not likely to be a silver bullet. The only way to solve the problem is a systemic analysis of sources of emissions, and we have to take into account a huge number of different options. If you want more detail on the figures, Jon Rynn at Grist has started to put together some spreadsheets to add up all the sources of emissions, and some specific contributors.

BTW, the IPCC’s frequently asked questions is a great primer for anyone new to the physics of climate change.

A Requirements Modeling Challenge

21. March 2009 · 1 comment · Categories: climate modeling, data modeling, research ideas · Tags: decarbonization, emissions, models, requirements

Here’s a challenge for the requirements modelling experts. I’ve phrased it as an exam question for my graduate course on requirements engineering (the course is on hiatus, which is lucky, because it would be a long exam…):

Q: The governments of all the nations on a small blue planet want to fix a problem with the way their reliance on fossil fuels is altering the planet’s climate. Draw a goal model (using any appropriate goal modeling notation) showing the key stakeholders, their interdependencies, and their goals. Be sure to show how the set of solutions they are considering contribute to satisfying their goals. The attached documents may be useful in answering this question: (a) A outline of the top level goals; (b) A description of the available solutions, characterized as a set of Stabilization Wedges; (c) A domain expert’s view of the feasbility of the solutions.

Update: Someone’s done the initial identification of actors already.